Brian Doyle’s The Kind of Brave You Wanted to Be is a book of cadenced notes on the swirl of miracle and the holy of attentiveness; a book about children and birds, love and grief and everything alive, which is to say all prayers.

    Proposing models of hybridity, each of the book's major sequences develops a unique subject, rhythm, and form. Bringing to light the molten potential at the core of personality, the poems illuminate ways that language, as history read by anthropologists, discourse between lovers, gestures between parent and child, graffiti in temples, or even language as an event in itself (the very experience of words at play), incarnates presence. Addressing father and son relationships, and venerating erotic love, Gander's poems surge with vitality: the energy of active discovery.

    Can you handle her truth? "I loved him so much. I loved him and I hated him. I needed him and I needed to be free of him. He was everything to me and he'd taken everything away from me." Olivia Moy, widow of a beloved author, struggles to cope with the untimely death of her husband. Seeking solace with her only child, she soon befriends a neighbor and begins to reveal closely-held marital secrets. Can she find healing without destroying her late-husband's legacy?